It’s unclear how HACLA systems were breached and exactly what information was stolen.
It’s not the local housing authority to find itself subject to a ransomware attack. In recent years, hackers have infiltrated the Indianapolis Housing Agency, the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority in Ohio and the Bremerton Housing Authority in Washington state., a research fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, believes HACLA is unlikely to cave to the hackers’ payment demands. But he says it’s not surprising that the agency was targeted.
“Lockbit believes that this is going to be a low-cybersecurity resource organization,” Merrill said. In the hackers’ minds, he said, local housing authorities are “not only easy to penetrate, but they are likely to pay because they don't have the capacity to recover from a ransomware attack.” This is the second major attack on L.A.’s public sector over the past year. The Los Angeles Unified School District was